A talk with Paul Ardenne    

September 20, 2018 | Seaside Arena, Beirut Waterfront
 

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Paul Ardenne, Writer and Historian of Art, animated an interactive conference entitled “Art in the public space, a genealogy, a reality”.

 

 

“What is the destination of art? Is the artist an important person? Can she or he change the world to make it better and how?

Now these questions are relevant and very important. Actually our world is not going well; we need obviously, all the energies and all the good will to make it more livable.”

 

The lecture reported relationships between art and physical territory, especially the public space. The accent was put in it on the humanized territories, of which the city, first and foremost. It highlighted the question of the "exit" of the artist (the artists are leaving their workshop and decide to work outside), of the gradual conquest of the territory of the city by artists and by art. In addition, it showcased the way there artists use the public space as a perimeter of intervention and as an artistic argument. With multiple intentions, among them the exploratory will, the research of a social link, and the revelations of the characteristic tensions of the urban fact.

 

The relationship between the modern then the contemporary artist with the "territory" is multi-form.

For her or for him, the first rule is to act directly in the city, in the street, without the filter of the control, outside the art gallery or the museum. To act outside gives the artist some freedom, freedom of speech, freedom of exposure, freedom of contacts with people directly.

This opportunity of meetings and of encounters gives the artist the ability to make buzz, to move the urban landscape, to create news social links, also to rehab the territory.

 

Classically, public art is made of statues, great official monuments. This is a very stable aesthetic offer. When an artist is working directly in the public space, of course she or he is changing the whole deal. She or he breaks the ordinary relationship of people with the classic and traditional public art, she or he renews the landscape of the city, she or he creates a new panorama.

 

Here the notions of short time, of intervention are essential. The event in itself is an aesthetics. As you know well, the contemporary public art is always ephemeral, without a long duration, it is a merge, a profusion of aesthetics and of sensibility.  It creates, as says the French philosopher Jacques Rancière, a new "sharing of the sensibility".

 

Between the humanized territories, the city soon distinguishes itself by the strongest attraction, which it exercises on the world of the art. The modernity confirms this transformation, from before 20th century.

 

The quiet universe calmed of the countryside, for a long time, had attracted the artists working "on the motive", as the Flemish landscape painters or the famous French school of Barbizon.

However, the urban development that accompanies the industrial revolution throughout the 19th century expires this direction. The city becomes then an essential, highly magnetic "chronotope", of the modern creation…